


Damned and Glorious Remains

by StarsInMyDamnEyes



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Jaskier | Dandelion, Cat School (The Witcher), Child Abuse, Competent Jaskier | Dandelion, Gen, Gen Fic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jaskier | Dandelion Has a Past, Jaskier | Dandelion Uses a Sword, School of the Cat, This was supposed to be a oneshot but then it grew a plot, Witcher Jaskier | Dandelion, Young Jaskier | Dandelion, as is par for the fucking course, gratuitous liberties taken with canon geography, i absolutely fucking Love that that is in fact a tag, i say implied bc technically it’s not onscreen but i lean into the child abuse aspect a lot, i should probably tag child abuse, no beta we die like vesemir, tags to be added as work updates, they don’t count as ocs if i don’t give a shit about them, which i detail thoroughly, will i ever not write witcher!jaskier? Sources say no, witcher ocs to fill the void left by canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24669565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarsInMyDamnEyes/pseuds/StarsInMyDamnEyes
Summary: It had started, ironically enough, with an assassination.Or rather, it wassupposedto have started with an assassination, before the assassin was promptly discovered by one of the Viscount’s many guards. At this point, an alarm had been raised, and the whole situation had promptly devolved into a bloodbath. It had been minorly inconvenient before that - the disgusting little excuse of a creature that fancied himself Viscount de Lettenhove and his vile little maggot of a wife would not, after all, be missed - but then some frustratingly loyal busybody had alerted the household to the attack, and the assassin had decreed this cause to slaughter everyoneelsein the manor, at which point it was hardly an assassination anymore, but rather a massacre.Jaskier - or rather, Julian, the young son of the Viscount de Lettenhove - is claimed by a witcher of the School of the Cat.
Comments: 33
Kudos: 150





	Damned and Glorious Remains

**Author's Note:**

> Finally fucking learnt what line breaks are
> 
> This was meant to be a oneshot about Catskier (sadly not an actual cat unfortunately) and it grew a plot so now i have THREE multichapters to fail at updating!!! Yay!!!
> 
> Anyways enjoy i guess
> 
> The chapter’s short and for this i am sorry :’D
> 
> I am procrastinating on my bad fic with more bad fic and i heartily apologise

It had started, ironically enough, with an assassination.

Or rather, it was _supposed_ to have started with an assassination, before the assassin was promptly discovered by one of the Viscount’s many guards. At this point, an alarm had been raised, and the whole situation had promptly devolved into a bloodbath. It had been minorly inconvenient before that - the disgusting little excuse of a creature that fancied himself Viscount de Lettenhove and his vile little maggot of a wife would not, after all, be missed - but then some frustratingly loyal busybody had alerted the household to the attack, and the assassin had decreed this cause to slaughter everyone _else_ in the manor, at which point it was hardly an assassination anymore, but rather a massacre.

This turn of events did not bide well for Julian, who had, at the time, been curled up, shirtless, on his bed, trying not to irritate the freshly-opened lash marks on his back.

It was hardly logical on the part of the Viscount - of _course_ Julian’s performance in his drills and training would suffer if he ordered his knights to cut open his back with a whip. But then, Julian had made the mistake of actually voicing his thoughts on the matter, which had resulted in another lashing, the kind of which was usually reserved for prisoners unforthcoming with information rather than mouthy nine-year-old boys, but at this point Julian was accustomed to it. His running theory was that his father was allergic to restraint, as well as anything that could conceivably be misconstrued as kindness, but that wasn’t exactly something he could prove.

Regardless, he supposed he was reaping the benefits of his father’s bullheaded insistence that he be trained to perfection as a fighter now - instead of the payoff being his bringing glory to the Lettenhove name through victories across the continent, the stinging wounds on his back that his father had put there had kept him awake enough that he hear the assassin painting the corridors of the manor with the blood of everyone who’d ever hurt him.

He’d have been thankful for it, if he wasn’t acutely aware that he was as good as dead the moment the assassin spotted him.

Julian had scaled the wall down into the gardens multiple times beforehand - of course he had, because he wasn’t about to let the good gentry of Lettenhove infringe on his freedom even when he was finally _alone_ \- but never whilst curled up in pain from lashes, and he didn’t fancy his chances of making it down in his condition. The assassin was in the halls, and he would undoubtedly be making his way towards Julian’s room, which only meant that Julian had to make it _out_ of his room even faster.

It was a lot easier said than done with a split-open back, but running through blood-slick halls with pain tearing at his back was preferable to ending his short life on the business end of someone else’s blade. He’d almost made it to one of the side-doors, in fact, when the shadowy figure of the assassin - and it had to be the assassin, dressed all in black and covered in copious amounts of blood, yet moving without an injury hampering him - rounded the corner and charged at him, short sword in hand.

The side-door was usually guarded, and proof of this lay in the prone form of one of the Viscount’s men sprawled on the floor, evidence that the assassin had already passed him by.

Julian, without hesitating, drew the dead man’s sword and fell into a defensive stance.

The assassin brought his blade down from above in a heavy blow, which Julian leapt and rolled from, much to the protest of his back, dulled a little by adrenaline but still painful.

He gritted his teeth as he came to a halt, once more in a position to defend. He could at once see he was right to dodge - the sword had come down hard enough to split stone.

“You think you can fight a witcher in _your_ state?”

The assassin was close enough for Julian to make out inhuman yellow irises, glinting in the moonlight, pupils narrowed into slits.

Oh.

Julian had heard of witchers before - knew that they were inhuman mutants, artificially enhanced to be more powerful than any man. Of course he couldn’t fight one.

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to roll over and die just for this man’s benefit.

Julian raised his sword, and the man - assassin, witcher, whatever - laughed.

He supposed he did look a bit ridiculous, a nine-year-old boy with a split-open back preparing to face down a mutant that had just massacred an entire manor-full of people without even getting out of breath, but fuck it.

Julian leapt at the man, aiming to slip under his guard and deliver a diagonal downwards slash to his thigh, but the witcher was _fast_ , and his blade was coming down towards Julian far before it should have.

Still, two could play that game, and Julian, too, had trained for speed. He twisted his own sword to catch the strike before it could gain any real power, though he still almost buckled under the force.

He skirted behind the witcher, leaping up and slashing at his back, and the witcher parried his sword without even turning to face him.

Julian knew what it looked like when someone was humouring their opponent, toying with them and testing them, and that was exactly what the witcher was doing - his instructors were all fond of the practice, and Julian knew a test when he saw one.

The witcher could easily end his life if he wanted to, Julian was acutely aware - the only reason he hadn’t, yet, was because he didn’t _want_ to. Because, for some perverse reason, he wanted to see Julian fight.

He slashed at the witcher’s lower calves, an attack that the man easily dodged, at the same time turning to jab at the boy.

He rolled out of the way of the attack, his back screaming in protest, but if the fact that the witcher had deemed him interesting was what was keeping him alive, than he’d be the most interesting person on the planet for the witcher’s sake, his back be _damned_.

Staring into the witcher’s inhuman, yellow irises, Julian readied himself to strike.

“Why are you fighting me, boy? You don’t stand a chance.”

Julian glared. “Yeah, I do. You’re giving me one. I’m not stupid, I have eyes.”

The witcher snorted at that, and swung at the boy with a newfound ferocity, evidently tiring of this child who would raise a blade against a witcher, and Julian rolled out of the way again. His back was most emphatically not enjoying all the harsh contact with a stone floor, but fuck it, it was preferable to having his head split open by a witcher assassin.

Taking a moment to steady himself, Julian leapt at the witcher, slashing for his throat, only to be met with the sound of a sword clattering to the floor and the feeling of strong hands, one circling his wrist, his sword arm, the other snagging his waist and pulling him from his trajectory, and with a sinking feeling, he realised that the witcher had _caught_ him, and then his hand was free but there was a burst of pressure at the back of his head and then _nothing_.

* * *

When Julian came to, his head was pounding. For an idle moment, he wondered what he might have _done_ , when he remembered the witcher.

He’d cuffed him - not even with the pommel of his sword, but with his _hand_ \- round the back of the head and knocked him out, after they fought. Right. That was a little odd. He’d been expecting the witcher to kill him, too, given how he’d killed everyone else in the Lettenhove manor without a second thought.

That was odd.

He sat up, a little, and realised that he was on a cart, loaded up with things he recognised from Lettenhove - trinkets and jewellery and clothing and half the armoury.

Julian blinked.

“Did you rob the manor?”

The witcher scoffed, not looking back at the boy from his seat in his saddle, atop a fearsome-looking stallion.

Alright, then. Apparently murderous witchers were not much for conversation. Who knew?

Julian brought a hand up to his chest, feeling it to be bound with bandages. Was that for his back? It must have been, he hadn’t drawn blood anywhere else.

He bit back a snort of laughter. The irony of it all - of course the deranged killer, who’d massacred the entirety of Lettenhove’s gentry minus Julian himself, and all those in their employ, would do more to tend to his wounds than his own bloody parents ever had.

“Thank you.”

The witcher _did_ reply to that, an incredulous undertone to his gruff, unpleasant voice. “The fuck are you thanking me for?”

“My back.”

“The bandages? Didn’t do it for you, it’d just be a waste of time if you dropped dead of infection before we reached the citadel.”

“I’ve never died of infection before,” Julian pointed out, earning himself a snort.

“That’d be plain luck on your part, then. You always tend to a fucking wound. Didn’t whoever trained you teach you that?”

This was probably a cue for a polite answer, to reinforce the witcher’s opinion with a confirmation of its validity, but Julian was not feeling particularly polite at the given moment, and had no inclination to stroke the witcher’s ego.

“The fuck do you think?”

“Rhetorical question, smartass.”

“So was mine.”

The witcher growled. “Shut up, or I throw you in a ditch.”

Julian shut up at that, because he was unarmed, with no idea how far he was from civilisation, and a man who had just massacred hundreds of people on a whim was generally not one to bluff.

He stayed silent for a good while - just long enough to make his next query seem genuine and not an attempt to rile the witcher up - listening to the rhythmic thudding of the horse’s hooves on the dirt track, before speaking again.

“What are you gonna do with me?”

“What do you think? I’m a witcher, connect the fucking dots, kid.”

“I don’t know what the dots I’m supposed to connect are, _Sir Witcher_. You kill monsters, I don’t know, are you going to use me as bait? Seems like a waste of bandages if you are.”

“Your father never threaten you that the witchers were gonna take you away if you didn’t behave?”

Julian scoffed. “My father didn’t _threaten_.”

“Cry me a river, kid. I’m taking you to Stygga, we’re running pretty dry on recruits.”

“Where’s Stygga?”

“Fuck, don’t you ever shut up? You’ll see where it is when we get there. Now please, for the love of Melitele’s sweet tits, _be fucking quiet_ before I _gag_ you.”

Julian shut up properly, at that.

* * *

It turned out that witchers did not simply stop their thankless work just because they had suddenly acquired stray children.

Or, maybe some did, Julian couldn’t possibly speak for all witchers, but the Murderer of Lettenhove was not one of them. He rode the next day into a small town - and it was one Julian remembered passing through, once, on a trip to his uncle’s residence in Kerack proper - and left Julian with his cart and his horse with a sword, some plain bread, and strict instructions to guard all of the witcher’s belongings with his life, whilst the witcher went looking for a contract.

It turned out that, whilst Julian had been absent from the world, news of massacre at the Viscount de Lettenhove’s stupid fucking manor had spread like wildfire. It was seemingly all anyone could talk about, given that everyone who passed him was discussing it.

_“-that they even killed the stable-boys and kitchen girls! Whatever did that, it can’t possibly have been-”_

_“-in the dead of night, and Julia, one of the butlers, had only gotten back from her day off at midnight, I know as my sister saw her off-”_

_“-heard that the Viscount’s son’s not dead but missing, and Tommy swears blind that he did it, I know he was only a boy but he was supposed to have been trained by masters-”_

_“-was an assassination, they suspect, but who would have ordered it? I think it’s-”_

_Julian almost wished that someone would start discussing literally anything else, because he knew damn well what had happened at Lettenhove, so it wasn’t even an interesting topic to ponder._

Idly, he wondered how nobody took one look at the suspicious boy that had suspiciously arrived on a suspicious cart stacked with suspicious items, travelling with a suspicious witcher, and perhaps taken some kind of notice of him and perhaps even connected him to the mysterious missing child from the nearby manor. Evidently, the common folk of the continent were about as intelligent as the gentry - that was, to say, that they too were as dumb as bricks.

Possibly dumber.

Either way, Julian was bored. He sat on the cart, keeping an eye out and chewing on the bread that the witcher had so generously provided him with. He needn’t have worried - the villagers gave them a wide berth, likely not wanting to cause trouble, especially with the recent assassinations fresh in everyone’s minds.

Casting an eye over the cart, he noticed that none of the clothes the assassin had looted were _his_ , but rather the more expensive pieces in his parents’ wardrobes, probably to be sold for coin.

Brilliant. He didn’t even have a shirt or shoes to speak of. Would it have _killed_ the witcher to be a tiny bit considerate? They were going to be trekking across the continent to the gods only knew where, and Julian didn’t even have _shoes_.

The witcher returned soon enough, anyways, face contorted in anger and the scent of blood hanging around him, a small chest under his arm. He ignored Julian completely as he shoved the chest into the cart, before getting on the horse and nudging it into action. They left the little town as swiftly as they had arrived in it.

He didn’t want to say anything, lest the witcher decide that he was more of a bother than he was worth, so his suspicions went unvoiced and unconfirmed, but Julian supposed that he’d just met with the person who’d contracted him for the assassinations. Possibly, whoever it was had tried to stiff him on payment.

Julian really was getting quite sick of all the silence.

* * *

Travelling with the witcher ended up being rather dull and monotonous. Beyond feeding him, giving him the odd instruction, and checking on his back wounds to ensure they were healing properly - which they were, surprisingly enough, given that Julian’s back was more scar tissue than skin - the witcher was content to ignore him.

The journey was long, far longer than Julian had expected - they’d left Redania altogether, and were currently travelling through Temeria. In a moment of fleeting even-temperedness, the witcher had told Julian that their journey was to be incredibly long, taking them through Mahakam after Temeria, then Sodden, then Cintra, Erlenwald, Nazair, then Metinna, and _then_ halfway through Ebbing, at which point they would _finally_ reach the mysterious Stygga Citadel.

At their pace, with only minimal breaks for rest - mostly for the horse’s benefit - they would make it to Stygga by the spring.

Julian resisted pointing out that they could make it a lot faster if they’d just gone for the coast and sailed to Ebbing. What did he know, after all? He was just a kid, knowledge like the fact that boats were faster than horses was surely beyond him.

They fell into a steady rhythm, of travelling and taking contracts and not interacting with each other beyond what they had to. The witcher had, at one point early in their acquaintance, pushed some newly-purchased clothes at Julian, evidently having also noticed his oversight, and informed him that he could now help on a contract or two, pull his weight a little, if he was going to be a drain on his resources.

Privately, Julian thought that that was a little bit rich coming from the kidnapper who had made a handsome sum of money looting and selling the Lettenhove manor’s contents.

Still, the witcher had actually attempted to leave him in a ditch, once, so Julian was hardly inclined to push his luck.

The first contract that the witcher had him complete was to kill a lone drowner by a river. It was, by and large, the type of contract that the man would not generally have bothered with, so naturally it was something that Julian should do. Killing a drowner for ten orens was hardly a worthwhile activity, but Julian hardly had a choice in the matter.

He was beginning to suspect that the reason the witcher had started taking assassination contracts was the fact that those actually paid half-decently.

“Anything i should know about drowners, so it doesn’t kill me when I try to stab it?” Julian asked, testing the witcher’s silver sword in his hand.

“Yeah. Mind the sharp bits.”

“Oh, thanks, I never would have known.”

“Just kill the fucking thing already, then we can _go_ ,” the witcher growled, crossing his arms. “I want to make it to Ebbing at _some_ point.”

“Then why have we stopped for the drowner in the first place?”

“Because we did. Now hurry _up_.”

Julian rolled his eyes exaggeratedly and made his way over to the riverbank.

The drowner was twice his size, but he was used to fighting larger opponents - his father didn’t employ _other children_ to train him, after all - but he had no idea how strong the monster was, and he didn’t quite fancy finding out it could land a blow strong enough to wrench him off his feet whilst trying to block it. Too, he had no idea as to how fast a drowner generally was, so attacking head-on was definitely a bad idea.

Keeping to the shadows, he circled around it, positioning himself behind the drowner with it being none the wiser, and leapt at it.

Had Julian been taller, or stronger, or at all inclined to climb a tree, he would have gone for the neck, but as it was, he darted low, slashing at the drowner’s leg. He wasn’t quite strong enough to sever it, but he came close, slicing the leg deeply enough that the creature would never stand on it again.

Giving the drowner no time to recover, Julian slipped closer to it and, before it could decide to maul him, thrust the sword up through its rib cage via its upper abdomen, hoping against hope that drowner biology wasn’t structured in such a way that would render his blow non-lethal.

The drowner let out an ear-splitting screech, and Julian freed the sword and retreated hastily, rolling out of its reach. He braced himself for the damn thing to attack - it would be just his luck - but instead, it just staggered forwards slightly and collapsed.

Apparently drowner biology was at least vaguely conventional, after all. That had been far easier a fight than Julian expected.

“Right,” the witcher said, making his way towards the drowner corpse. “Ten orens is hardly worth wasting our time on, but drowner innards are damn useful for potions. Clean the sword and wait for me by the cart.”

If he needed the drowner dead for potion ingredients, Julian thought crossly, as he made his way towards the cart covered in a bit more monster blood than he was comfortable with, then he could have just said so.

* * *

It occurred to Julian, by the time they reached Mahakam, that he didn’t know the witcher’s name, and it was likely that the witcher, in turn, did not know his - or if he did, he didn’t use it. It was odd, how they’d gone so long without even being introduced - to him, the witcher was just ‘witcher’, and in return, the witcher only addressed Julian directly, never actually referring to him even as ‘boy’. That was fine by him, he knew his own name, and didn’t need reminding, and was sure that the same went for the witcher, but he was at least vaguely curious as to what the identity of the man who’d so graciously shaken up Julian’s life actually was.

Still, as any attempt on his part to communicate with the man usually ended in him being threatened by an irate witcher - the level of patience he had was evidently on par with what the Viscount de Lettenhove had also been capable of during his miserable stint among the living - Julian was honestly just surprised that the man had managed to curb his snappish instincts to cause harm at bay long enough for him to drag the boy along, rather than outright killing him.

But that was neither here nor there, in the long run.

The witcher at least trusted Julian not to be woefully incompetent - they’d ended up with a kind of rota to add to their routine, wherein Julian would sleep on the cart as they travelled, and then play sentry to the camp while the witcher meditated, or, more recently, slept.

Julian _hated_ it, rotten and boring work as it was, but he managed with it well enough.

His trainers had all repeated to him not to practice alone, as it would only embed error, but if the witcher had spared him for his competence, he saw no point in letting it wither. He drilled basic practices as he stood guard over the measly little campsite the witcher had set up, and did his best to appraise his own form, even if he was hard-pressed to actually manage to do so competently.

The gods knew he didn’t want to end up being rusty the next time the witcher decided to throw him at a monster - and he would have ample opportunity to do so, given the sheer length of the journey.

Stygga Citadel, the seat of whatever a group of witchers was called, was in the middle of Ebbing, widely considered by cartographers to be the southernmost part of the Continent - he’d had one of his tutors, in the lessons that further packed his bloated schedule, explain that some people were of the opinion that the southern border of Ebbing aligned with where the Continent ended and a new landmass began - and Redania was firmly in the north. If the sheer list of kingdoms their journey would take them through didn’t quite hammer home enough how long the journey was going to be, the that certainly did.

It was going to be a long few months for Julian.

* * *

They had made it all the way to Cintra before the horse snapped its leg in a gully.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m @stars-in-my-damn-eyes on tumblr in case you want to leave witchery things in my ask box or anything I guess jfghkdjfshgkj
> 
> If you comment i owe you my firstborn and my undying thanks :’D


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